Free The Magus, A Revised Version by John Fowles Page B

sere notifier of what is.
    It was too horrible. There was still a week to the end of term, and I thought of leaving at once and going back to England. Yet I couldn ’ t bear the idea of London, and there was a sort of anonymity in Greece, if not on the island. I didn ’ t really trust Dr Patarescu; one or two of the older masters were his cronies and I knew they often saw him for whist. I searched every smile, every word spoken to me, for a reference to what had happened; and I thought that the very next day I saw in various eyes a certain dry amusement. One morning during break the headmaster said, ‘ Cheer up, kyrios Urfe, or we shall say the beauties of Greece have made you sad. ’ I thought this was a direct reference; and the smiles that greeted the remark seemed to me to be more than it merited. Within three days of seeing the doctor I decided that everyone knew about my disease, even the boys. Every time they whispered I heard the word ‘ syphilis ’ .
    Suddenly, in that same terrible week, the Greek spring was with us. In only two days, it seemed, the earth was covered with anemo nes, orchids, asphodels, wild gladioli; for once there were birds every where, on migration. Undulating lines of storks croaked overhead, the sky was blue, pure, the boys sang, and even the sternest masters smiled. The world around me took wing, and I was stuck to the ground; a Catullus without talent forced to inhabit a land that was Lesbia without mercy. I had hideous nights, in one of which I wrote a long letter to Alison, trying to explain what had happened to me, how I remembered what she had said in her letter in the canteen, how now I could believe her; how I loathed myself. Even then I managed to sound resentful, for my leaving her began to seem like the last and the worst of my bad gambles. I might have married her; at least I should have had a companion in the desert.
    I did not post the letter, but again and again, night after night, I thought of suicide. It seemed to me that death had marked my family down, right back to those two uncles I had never known, one killed at Ypres and the other at Passchendaele; then my parents. All violent, pointless deaths, lost gambles. I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the n é ant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.
    The day before term ended I felt the balance tip. I knew what to do. The gatekeeper at the school had an old twelve-bore, which he had once off ered to lend me if I wanted to go shooting in the hills. I went and asked to borrow it. He was delighted and loaded my pocket with cartridges; the pine-forests were full of passage quail.
    I walked up a gulley behind the school, climbed to a small saddle, and went into the trees. I was soon in shadow. To the north, across the water, the golden mainland still lay in the sun. The air was very light, warm, the sky of an intense luminous blue. A long way away, above me, I could hear the bells of a flock of goats being brought back to the village for the night. I walked for some time. It was like looking for a place to relieve oneself in; I had to be sure I couldn ’ t be observed. At last I found a rocky hollow.
    I put a cartridge in the gun, and sat on the ground, against the stem of a pine tree. All around me grape hyacinths pushed through the pine-needles. I reversed the gun and looked down the barrel, into the black O of my non-existence. I calculated the angle at which I should have to hold my head. I held the barrel against my right eye, turned my head so that the shot would mash like black lightning through the brain and blast the back wall of my scull off . I reached for the trigger